Content note: this article contains references to sexual assault that readers may find upsetting.

When the worst happens, those at the centre of the story hope for justice — or, at the very least, to be believed. Unfortunately, the criminal justice system doesn’t always prove so reliable. On 23 March 2015, Denise Huskins and her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, were woken in the dead of night by a home invader. Huskins was kidnapped, and what transpired next in the terrifying tale is the subject of American Nightmare, the new docuseries from The Tinder Swindler filmmakers Felicity Morris and Bernadette Higgins. 

Across the US, the story of Huskins’ disappearance invited national media scrutiny, with many comparing it to Gone Girl, the hit 2014 film adapted from Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel. But what really happened, and how did the victim of an awful crime end up accused of staging her own kidnapping?

Huskins met her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, in 2014, in the Bay Area city of Vallejo, California, while working as physical therapists at a local hospital. On 23 March 2015, the couple were startled at around 3am by a flashing white light, red laser dots and what seemed to be a group of intruders wearing wet suits.

“Wake up! This is a robbery,” a man said. He zip-tied the couple, put duct tape-covered goggles over their eyes, and applied headphones playing pre-recorded messages that told them they’d be given sedatives, which would be forcibly injected if they refused the drugs. The intruder told Huskins: “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to take you for 48 hours.” He put her in the trunk of Quinn’s car and drove away. Huskins reappeared just over 48 hours later, 400 miles away in Huntington Beach, CA, near her father’s house. She appeared unharmed, though she later revealed that she had been raped twice by her kidnapper. 

But law enforcement claimed the young couple’s recounting of the events was too far-fetched for anyone to believe.

This is where the Gone Girl comparisons started to come in. Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel tracks the disappearance of a disenchanted small-town wife who, in a twist, reveals that she staged her own kidnapping in an act of domestic vengeance. The hit movie adaptation starring Rosamund Pike was released just a year prior to the break-in, and headlines quickly seized on the general similarity between its scarcely believable kidnapping plot and the harrowing details of Huskins’ ordeal. 

While Huskins was missing, Quinn was subjected to hours of intense interrogation from Vallejo detectives and FBI agents attempting to extract a confession of his involvement. When Huskins returned, police accused both of them of coordinating an elaborate kidnapping hoax.  

Incorporating a mix of interrogation footage and new interviews with Huskins, Quinn and the police department that interrogated them, the three-part docuseries American Nightmare seeks to unravel the consequences of our cultural rush to judgment — and what happens when law enforcement decides to focus on their version of the truth, even if it couldn’t be further from reality. 

Want to watch the shocking events unfold for yourself? American Nightmare is now available to stream worldwide on Netflix.

Images: Netflix